Speed and Magic.

We're excited to announce that we've now launched a new feature that allows you to change the appearance of your AMP site!

Many of you have websites that aren't just black text on a white background. You've spent a lot of time choosing the right theme for your main site - something that expresses your store perfectly. With theming you can now carry that over to your AMP site as well. It's super simple - just check out the dashboard and you'll see AMP Appearance Settings where you can change and preview:

Font Type

Font Color

Background Color

Button Color

Button Font Color

Header Color

and more!

To get there go to your RocketAmp Dashboard from the Apps section of your Shopify control panel. For more information, check out the video below.

Let us know if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or feedback by emailing us at contact@getrocketamp.com.

Previously, we talked about what AMP is at a high level, but for Shopify store owners there is still a lot to understand. Let’s take a look at why AMP is important and how RocketAmp can help.

AMP - A deeper look

When a customer comes to your website, a common path for them is to search for a product and get linked to your Shopify site from that search. When they visit the page, most of what they see is optimized for desktops and then made “responsive” for mobile. Responsive means that the content and theme are reorganized for a smaller device, but not necessarily optimized. This helps the visual appeal of the site, but it can be a poor experience for the slower, less powerful network and phone experience, and it doesn’t take into account the expectation of speed from your mobile customer. AMP does.

AMP is a technology that allows specific content to come through quickly and easily. It allows your site to get to a user by removing some of the unnecessary pieces of the page that the user might not even see, while allowing the important parts to come through. This affects performance in two ways. The first is how much information is being sent to the user’s device - the less information, the faster it all gets there. The second is that the amount of time it takes for the user’s phone to show your site to your customer is also shortened. AMP does this through the use of special ‘approved’ tags that can be applied to your site. The user’s phone sees these tags and knows how to quickly put the page together for the user.

Why RocketAmp for Shopify

We created RocektAmp because the mobile shopping experience doesn’t meet the expectations of mobile shoppers. According to Google Over 50% of searches are now being done on mobile and each of those users expects web pages to load just as fast as they would on desktop (under 2 seconds) [1,5]. Unfortunately that’s not the case - according to mobile testing company, dynatrace, on average these pages take 7 seconds [2] to load causing almost 60% of users to give up and abandon your site [3]. According to Amazon, for every 100ms that it takes a webpage to load, sales decrease by 1% [4]. In other words, slow web pages are costing businesses money. RocketAmp aims to change this.

While AMP itself is a technology to make pages load faster, your website still has to get AMP integrated in order to make that technology useful for customers. To make this complicated process easy, RocketAmp is an easily setup Shopify app. RocketAmp automatically and intelligently determines what on your site can already work with AMP and sends that content, each time a page loads.

Because RocketAmp sits between your site and the user, it is extremely flexible and virtually maintenance free.

Want to add a new product? Not a problem - RocketAmp will automatically handle those pages the instant a customer looks at them.

Want to change your store theme? Not a problem - RocketAmp will still be able to make sure your site looks great on mobile. (Note, full theme integration is not yet available)

Worried about your main site breaking? RocketAmp only adds a minimal amount of code necessary to make sure that your user’s device uses your AMP optimized page.

Want to keep the important engagement functionality? RocketAmp can already handle image and social functionality like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. We’re constantly building out functionality to add more optimized rich media like video, as well as tracking, analytics, and more as possible.

Google has already started promoting certain sites that use AMP in their search results. Starting with news sites, sites participating in AMP receive special treatment that allow users to know the site is AMP enabled through the user of an AMP icon. Already, 90% of publishers that have adopted AMP have seen higher click through’s to their sites. While AMP hasn’t been used to change search rankings, Google has been careful about how they word their answers but has indicated that product pages are in its future [6]

Since RocketAmp is a Shopify App, it’s a simple one time setup that will make your site faster for every mobile user and work with any changes you make. Get your customers from search to browse to buy with lightning speed using RocketAmp.

Google is a HUGE company with lots of big projects that you know and trust to get customers and readers to your site. Products like Chrome, Search, Ads, Gmail, and Maps can all help you reach your target audience, but Google also releases lots of small projects that can be just as impactful. One of these recent announcement was the addition of a new technology called AMP or, Accelerated Mobile Pages.

AMP is designed to do one thing and to do it well - make your mobile pages load lightning fast. For shop-owners this means that your product pages, including those great pictures, load quickly so your customers aren’t waiting around just your great merchandise. For news outlets it means that readers don’t wait for breaking news stories to load quickly on their devices. For everyone this means getting your customers more quickly through the journey of finding your site, viewing your content, and ultimately making that purchase, sharing the page, or completing the other goals you have for them.So, how does AMP make pages load so quickly? Simply put, AMP does three major things. First, it pulls anything that is unnecessary out of the page so only the truly important parts load, second, it maintains a special AMP cache, and third, it takes advantage of special browser based optimizations. Today’s customers are always on the go and don’t have time to wait for small parts of your site to finish loading - especially ones that they can’t see. When sites take a long time to load, they can lose interest and you can lose an opportunity. Of course this doesn’t mean that your page will look unflattering - after all you’ve probably spent a lot of time perfecting your site. With AMP you don’t have to sacrifice speed for a great customer experience. While not everything will work Google has incorporated ways to make sure that things like image carousels, lightboxes, video players, text formatting, social, and more will still work.

Google is already rolling out AMP globally so chances are high that you have a customer that could benefit from AMP no matter where they are. An accelerated webpage means you can deliver more content in less time and get your customers from searching to purchasing faster than ever.